Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To create something you want to sell, you first study and research the market, then you develop the product to the best of your ability.
She was a Privately funded spy ship owned by the corporation and headed by Juan Cabtillo. The Oregon was his brain child and his one true love.
My job is to entertain the readers in such a manner that, when they reach the end of the book, they feel like they've gotten their money's worth.
I've always been a Civil War buff. In fact, the ships that always fascinated me the most were the ironclads, because they were the start of an era.
If I were to say I'm looking for treasure, people would come up with the money. When I say I'm looking for a historic wreck, they're not interested.
People have said I belong in a rubber room because I look for wrecks, and when I find them, I just do a survey. I don't look for treasure or artifacts.
I was born about 80 years too late. If you were a kid in 1910, the Fourth of July was a big deal. You knew all about the Revolution, and you still had Civil War veterans.
I am not like Stephen King, who writes one book, then writes another. I finish a book and go off and... look for wrecks. Then, six months later, I might start another book.
If ever a car was created by designers with dreams of grandeur, it had to be the 1958 Buick Limited: the heftiest, highest-priced and most opulent monster ever to hit the street in the '50s.
She had the kids during the day and I would have them at night. That way they were never alone. I would put the kids to bed, and then I had nothing to do and nobody to talk to, so I would write.
If you have some natural talent and really want to write, you should read the books of someone who's very successful in your genre. You don't want to plagiarize, but you want to learn from that author.
I suppose, because I've been able to make a very good living writing books, that going out and finding another million dollars under the sea is not the fascination. The fascination is in finding the ship.
When I was in the military, I socked away $100 every month. When I was discharged in 1954, I got home at 5 A.M. By 10 A.M., I was pulling out of a foreign car dealership in Pasadena in a new Jaguar XK120.
Giordino...simply sighed in resignation. "Who else," he asked no one in particular, "but Dirk Pitt could tramp off into a blizzard on an uninhabited backwater island in the Antarctic and discover a beautiful girl?
I have a large collection of town cars because when I was just a snipe in the gutter, growing up in Los Angeles, a town car drove by. I remember running in the house to get my mother so she could see it. It was utterly magnificent.
I purchased a 1955 Rolls-Royce that my wife liked because it was new the year we were married. Then came a 1926 Hispano-Suiza Cabriolet that I bought at my first classic car auction after I had three martinis. As more cars were added, I had to buy a warehouse.
When I first started writing, I was in advertising at the time, I was doing most of my writing on weekends. I had studied most of the other series heroes and I figured it would be fun for mine to be different and put him in and around water. So I dreamed up Dirk Pitt.
I was driving by an auto auction one day, and they were auctioning off a beautiful Hispano-Suiza. I started bidding even though I hadn't even signed up with the officials. The last bid was $50,000, and it was mine. And I thought, 'My God, what have I done? I've never spent more than $500 in my life.' That was the first one.
I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis... Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.